Breweriana: Robinson’s advertising
If you’ve been following the different types of advertising that we collect, preserve, and make available for all to see, you’ll be familiar with ads in magazines, freebie handouts on the grocer’s counter, sales catalogues, brochures, recipe books, theatre programmes, car window stickers, trade directories, knitting patterns, and more. A new one to us that we recently highlighted was the record sleeve.
However, brewers often did their advertising differently. Certainly, they used the ‘traditional’ route of placement in magazines, but they had other routes only they could use. For example, in the pub. You’d go to the bar to buy a drink, and as you select your brand, you’ll be seeing advertising on the glasses and clips on the hand-pulls themselves. If you buy a bottle, you’ll find the label and (admittedly, less so nowadays) the moulding of the glass itself used for advertising. When you walk to your table, there’ll be poster ads on the wall, and once you’ve sat down, you’ll find beer mats on your table, with… advertising. And if you wander outside to the beer garden, you’ll find the parasols are sponsored by, well, you get the idea. So, you may think you’ve gone for a harmless pint, but you’ve unwittingly absorbed loads of sublimal advertising.
All very clever, and at the Archive we specialise in such ‘breweriana’. When our top volunteer Dickie goes for a pint – and he does like his pint – he’ll often go to the Dog and Partridge in Woodsmoor whose landlady Karen has allowed us some of the attached pictures to illustrate what’s going on. She is also very generous when Dickie nags her for the latest beer mats, clips and glasses to take away for our collection. The Dog and Partridge is a Robinson’s pub, and all of the photos here show how they do their advertising.
Once you’ve placed your order – and if it’s a pint, so not a set measure from a bottle – the publican is obliged to use an approved glass. For the last twenty years, these have borne an EU ‘CE’ stamp, with an ‘M’ marking giving the date of manufacture of the glass – so here in the photo, it’s a brand new glass (2026). This helps us to date beer glasses when we come to accession them. Of course, it never used to be this straightforward. Before that a national system was used, the Crown Stamp, and to work out the dates on these, further decoding is needed…
We’re hoping to do a blog soon on the brewers’ equivalent of the counter card, and to give you a taster, we’re showing here how Aperol do it: with display case, chalkboard and branded glass.
We always need volunteers to help us to date and catalogue our breweriana, so if this is your tipple, get in touch.
